Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023692, Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:20:43 -0300

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Re: Epigraphies and versipel
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Eric Naiman writes: "Berberova has supplied the dissolved epigraph for Nabokov studies... or at least a frequent point of discursive depature. In fact, one could make a case that the best books are composed of epigraphs too thoroughly dissolved to permit reconstruction. The words and themes swim about, but a single syntax eludes the reader. With some books, it isn't clear whether a term of negation is or is not part of the epigraph. With other books (i.e. Chevengur), the glue that would bind the lexical elements is radically insufficient."

Jansy Mello: Personally (may I?) I wouldn't stretch that far any theory of influence. Epigraphs are significant to particular people or group of people, mainly due to the precision or elegancebe in the formulation of an idea or feeling which others were unable to express with the same felicity. What's new in them lies in the author's style, more than in the novelty of concepts, emotions, images.When they are dissolved in the text they lose this characteristic. They may represent a tease (i.e,no easy wisdom is offered to be shared with z reader), an homage, a citation.

Eric Naiman's point helped me to imagine how did VN experience his multilingual talents and wide readings. I think that the use by John Shade of the rare word "versipel" (werewolf & its distant association to wergeld) might simply indicate a verbal monstrosity that some versionists, or reversionists, feel in themselves by the wealth of semiotic systems and languages they inhabit. The majority of articles to which I have access speak of Nabokov's exile and nostalgia, not of any hypothetical guilt feeling of "betrayal." We find, in an afterword to "Lolita," a poignant testimony not only of VN's spacial and temporal losses, but also of his new skin as an American writer.* "Versipel" could be the verbal image that renders VN's qualms towards his partially abandoned mother-tongue, then disguised into a parody of a country that lies far, far away.

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* - "But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.."

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